Episode #13
Between Land and Water: Dougal Kirkland on Wetlands, Queer Ecology and Emergence
In this episode, Rebecca speaks with Dougal Kirkland, an artist and printmaker whose work explores archaeology, folklore, wetlands, queer ecology, drawing, writing, and the material processes of image-making. The conversation begins with Dougal’s drawing practice, and the way drawing has shaped his relationship with landscapes, archaeological sites, museum objects, and the act of looking closely. Dougal reflects on his time at Goldsmiths, his later postgraduate study at the Drawing School, and the importance of drawing as a way of thinking, observing, processing, imagining, and entering into relationship with place. At the centre of the episode is Dougal’s research into wetlands and bog landscapes, sparked in part by drawing Lindow Man at the British Museum. Dougal discusses the intimacy and unease of encountering a preserved bog body in a museum setting, and how this led him to imagine drawing Lindow Man back into the bog. Dougal shares the rich and complex world of bogs: their liminality, their position between land and water, their ecological importance, their folklore, their preservation of bodies and objects, and their association with portals, offerings, spirits, boggarts, will-o’-the-wisps, and other beings. Dougal also introduces ideas from queer ecology, reflecting on how bogs, wetlands, queer theory, marginal landscapes, fluidity, otherness, non-binary thinking, queer plants, bog bodies, and archaeological artefacts can open up different ways of understanding nature, history, identity, and belonging. The conversation moves through sphagnum moss, peat, Gunnera, botanical colonialism, bog bodies, the Weerdinge Men, ritual death, queer ancestry, votive offerings, the Roos Carr figures, and the possibility of seeing wetlands as places that hold ambiguity, transformation, resistance, and deep time. The episode closes with Dougal reading Emergence, his written piece that centres around the last day of Lindow Man and imagines him as a queer ancestor. The piece draws together archaeology, folklore, environmentalism, plant lore, queer ecology, bog landscapes, deep time, ritual, and the strange intimacy of what emerges from the peat. This is a conversation about the places that refuse simple categories: land and water, body and archive, death and preservation, human and more-than-human, history and imagination, ecology and myth. Links: Website: dougalkirkland.co.uk Instagram: @dougalkirkland Therapeutic Landscapes: www.therapeutic-landscapes.org
